Money may be the biggest dead end of all

​I wonder if when Paul McCarney penned those words over 60 years ago, the words 'money can't buy me love,' if he saw coming just how much we'd come to love money, and just how much that love for money would come to cost us the love we need most.

I spent some time this week with a beautifully diverse group of people. It was part of a process for becoming a facilitator of an initiative called CHATS (connecting humans and telling stories). In this process, I was challenged to connect with some walks of life that I frankly don't typically walk with.

Why that is I am left to ponder. But I do ponder it differently now. Which, at its core, is the mission of CHATS.

During one of the activities, I was partnered with someone who is quite different from me. They looked different. They had different pronouns. In many ways, they come from a completely opposite place in life than me.

In this activity, we were challenged to reflect on an image we had chosen to reflect our outlook in that moment. I chose an image of a dead-end sign. I reflected to my partner that the way I see life, there is no such thing as a dead-ends. I shared that my life has become an example of 'the end' often becoming a beautiful beginning, if I'm willing to explore it as such.

Dead-ends are a myth to me, I shared.

Then next day, my new friend offered to our group that my reflection had shifted the way they see life. They shared that too often their own mindset in life is dead-end thinking, thinking constantly telling them they are not enough, and that as a result of my reflection they were going to challenge themselves to see more possibilities in their own dead-end thinking.

As they shared this, I found myself moved, so sweetly and beautifully moved. Because in the moment of another expressing how my words had shaped them, their words were shaping me. In very real time. Their words were making me wonder, have I truly looked beyond all of the dead-ends in my life in a search for more possibilities?

Later, in another exercise, I reflected to our group on the image of dollar signs. I shared that I thought we live in a world that feels like it no longer has the time to make the kind of connections we were making with one another in this experience. And that most of that feeling, I believe, is driven by our time spent chasing money and things, and not the possibilities that rest on the other side of the dead-ends we build into our thinking about one another.

I do wonder, do we chase money because we genuinely believe we need it. Or has money become a grand distraction from the difficult work of building connections?

The difficult work of setting aside prejudices and assumptions, because chasing money isn't that hard compared to breaking through the dead-ends we build into people's politics and religions and pronouns and social-economic statuses and countries of origin and etc.

Oh, we can come to think we know what those various labels tell us about someone. But we don't. Not at all. Not until we stand face to face and reflect together on the images of each other's lives.

Not until our shared reflections lure us beyond the dead-ends of our differences and into the possibility of common ground. A common ground built not on the various titles and labels of humanity, but on humanity itself.

A humanity created by love for love.

We miss that love quite often pursuing a love we were never created for.

Today, I am so incredibly grateful, thanks to an incredibly diverse group of people, to say and mean more than ever, "I don't care too much for money, money can't buy me love."

Because the reality is, in the end, money may be the biggest dead-end of all.